VMware on Monday will roll out a product family dubbed vCenter to automate data center tasks and manage to service level agreements.

The announcements will kick off VMworld 2009 in San Francisco this week.

VMware's vCenter products are designed to ride shotgun with the company's vSphere cloud computing operating system.

In a nutshell, vCenter is designed to automate tasks such as data center provisioning, monitoring, change and performance management. VMware added that vCenter is also designed to manage toward policies and service level agreements. Each virtual server that is deployed will operate to a specified service level.

The vCenter family includes:

AppSpeed to manage service level reporting for virtualized applications;

LifeCycle Manager, which automates virtual machines from provisioning to retirement;

Chargeback, which allocates infrastructure costs;

And Lab Manager, which aims to ease development, quality assurance and pre-production environments.

The vCenter apps will be sold a la carte per processor. Most of the vCenter family will ship in 2010.

Separately, VMware will announce VMware Go, a free beta service to get small and midsized businesses using virtualization tools quickly. VMware Go is a Web-based service that will walk customers through the ESXi, the company's free hypervisor. The VMware Go beta will start Monday and be generally available in the fourth quarter.

That is under the assumption that your data center has nothing but Intel platforms.
What about those self respecting data centers who have real mainframes and UNIX systems?
I don't think that VMware fits in those environments.